The Albert Hall is not London's most hospitable venue amid all this global warming. But with almost 100 concerts crammed into eight weeks, the BBC Promenade concerts can still claim, in their 112th season, to add up to the greatest music festival on earth. More than 300,000 people are expected to cram into the giant arena in this year's Proms season, with millions more in the BBC TV, radio and online audience.

This is one of the hallmarks, beyond continuing excellence, of the 10-year reign of Proms director Nicholas Kenyon: the expansion of the festival into a nationwide event, available across multiple media platforms, and linking cities all over the country for such occasions as the Proms in the Park and the (dread) Last Night.

The third instalment of the Proms' very own Ring cycle was less stellar than the first two, showcases for Simon Rattle and Placido Domingo. Wagner's Siegfried began laboriously, with minimal frisson from the Orchestre de Paris under Christoph Eschenbach. But Volker Vogel's Mime soon injected some spark into the proceedings, reinforced by Jon Fredric West's enthusiastic if inelegant Siegfried. West's stamina and vocal heft were compensation enough for his gauche theatricality.

Evgeny Nikitin proved a potent if youthful Wanderer, Sergei Leiferkus a suave Alberich, Qiu Lin Zhang a transfixing Erda and Olga Sergeeva a luminous Brünnhilde. What a pleasure to hear this great work performed with mounting panache, while picturing your own dream production in the privacy of your imagination.

Mark Elder will be back on the Last Night, for the first time in 20 years, but his Halle Prom offered more substantial fare in the shape of two very different works, written just three years apart at the turn of the 20th century. Rarely have I heard the hostility of the sea evoked as eerily as in his polished account of Debussy's La Mer, while the youthful shortcomings of Sibelius's First Symphony were indulged in a tender rendition that drew out le vrai Sibelius lurking beneath his homage to Tchaikovsky.

The central work, Colin Matthews's Horn Concerto, required the conductor to arrive onstage after it had started, and leave before it ended, while the soloist, Richard Watkins, wandered the full width of the platform and the orchestra's horn section roved right round the hall. Its spatial guile is but one of the charms of this dream-like piece, its romantic framework haunted by a series of troubled intrusions.

Matthews's 60th birthday was further celebrated in this year's first Late Night Prom, with his elegant four-minute nod to Mozart's musical dice game, To Compose Without the Least Knowledge of Music, joining Jonathan Dove's suave update of themes from The Marriage of Figaro, Figures in the Garden, as hors d'oeuvres to the great B flat Serenade - all ravishingly played by London Winds under Michael Collins.

Two years since their first collaboration, Man and Boy: Dada, about the artist Kurt Schwitters and the mother of a London boy who collects bus tickets, Michael Nyman and Michael Hastings have written another opera about another unlikely couple, a university maths lecturer and a washed-up, innumerate boxer.

In Love Counts, given its British premiere at the Almeida, numbers hang symbolically from the ceiling, to be lit up at appropriate moments, as a sexual relationship develops between the teacher, Avril, and Patsy, the man she encounters punching a tree as she cycles to work through the park.

Avril has been married to a wife-beater, which makes it all the more improbable that she would fall for a pugilist ignorant of her speciality, numbers. Patsy cannot even read that of a passing bus. As she sets out to teach him, however, they are drawn into an affair that is by turns explicit and touching.

Nyman's jaunty, at times tender, reworking of Bach chorales is as well served by his librettist as by his director, Lindsay Posner, conductor Paul McGrath and especially the persuasive cast, the sympathetic but wary Helen Williams as Avril and gruff, lumbering Andrew Slater as Patsy.

It all seems to end in tears when Patsy defies her by returning to the gym, and winds up using a wheelchair. But she is last seen pushing him around the park, so perhaps they have a future, after all. Via this intimate coupling of music and words, by turns witty and nostalgic, Nyman and Hastings reveal themselves to be sentimental old souls, intent on turning Raging Bull into Love Story.